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Wordgasm is a portmanteau of "words" and "orgasm", an outburst of words with the same euphoric effect of squirting your DNA. Nihil sub sole novum, the Ecclesiastes say; there is nothing new under the sun. It is only but words that grant the world a whole new spectrum of perception. And the point is? I have no idea.
She lives and works from her laptop on a little paradise island in the Philippines. She's a writer, graphic artist, and mountaineer. During rainy days she loves to sleep and oversleep and dream and daydream and then write. More »
+ Alyssa Guico
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Saturday, 07 November 2009
comment [1]
The next frontier in science fiction isn't about aliens. It's about alienation. It isn't about new worlds peppered among those billions of galaxies in space. It's about the most desolate, dullest place man can ever step on. Duncan Jones' Moon experiments with just that. Click the link for the bloody synopsis, I haven't got the patience to summarize the thing. Just a couple of things the movie is assuming:
All thus listed except the last are difficult to swallow. Should Moon pose itself a hard SF flick, it lacks the kick to prompt me to suspend my disbelief. 1. Yes, Helium 3 is an excellent energy replacement for fossil fuels. Turns machines into tree huggers. But sending mining equipments and space shuttles to and fro the moon costs billions of dollars worth of rocket fuel. It just isn't practical. Say, man has discovered a cheaper way to transport He3 to Earth. American pirates wouldn't be the only ones digging the treasure on the moon would it. Arr, moonbase pirateships representing different countries all over the world would flock the dull rock. It'd be a hubbub of eyepatched Johnny Depps sword fighting and smashing rum bottles against each other. 2. Harvesting the moon its He3 poses ethical problems which have yet to be protected by cosmological laws. It's no different from illegal logging, in other words. The moon is necessary to sustain the evolutionary processes of life on Earth. Harvesting its resources, thereby transferring its mass to Earth, has detrimental effect on gravity. This simplest most important law of nature, if tipped to the tiniest of changes, could result in mass extinction of several species. He3 just isn't the answer to our global energy crisis. The problem isn't energy crisis to begin with. It's overpopulation. Producing too many humans too fast wanting so many things all at the same time, sooner or later you wouldn't wonder why you're breathing more fart than you normally should. Nevertheless, the moon would suffer the same fate of Nibbler's home planet Vergon 6 if it were to be mined. After Vergon 6 was harvested of its dark matter pellets (the fecal matter of Nibblonians), it simply collapsed into itself. If the moon collapses into itself, what would become of hippie surfers all over the world? What would become of evolution? 3 & 4. Reproductive cloning. It's not like this hasn't been dealt with before. In Futurama, Professor Hubert Farnsworth cloned himself to grant him a successor to all his inventions. His clone Cubert, however, is far beyond the mirror image of himself. For one, Cubert's nose is upturned and pig-like due to being squashed up too long against the wall of his cloning tube. Besides that, he doesn't give a doodley-squat about Farnsworth's inventions. He doesn't want to be a scientist. He wants to be an artist. Case point in: clones are unique in themselves regardless of the fingerprints they share with their original copies. Moon is suffering from multiple identity crisis, existential and suicidal at that, once the clones realize they indeed are clones. But what makes clones different from their original copy? The answer is this: nothing. Structurally, there is no discernible difference. A clone is a carbon-copy of the original, regardless of its unique personality traits. So: what power does anybody have, anybody at all, to say that clones are inferior to their original copy? If I cook carbonara and cook another the exact same way, what grants anybody the power to tell which is better? Whoever that person is, he's a royally pompous asswipe. Despite this, them clones in the movie are no different from the robot Gerty. All of them were programmed by real humans who came from real slimy vaginae. They share the same properties of mass produced objects, much like the mass produced clones in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But Huxley's reproductive cloning was rather socially acceptable. It wasn't just acceptable; it was the norm. Moon, however, is grounded on the same beliefs and ideologies we have about cloning today. The debate persists, and the world of Moon is still immature and oblivious to take any side just yet. Is it supporting cloning or is it against it? Then comes the question: where the hell is the humanity in all this torpedo shit? And what the fuck is up with all the cloning when AI's can do all the stupid harvesting to begin with? I just fail to see the purpose of a human being on the moon. The movie can do away with the cloning--what with all that personal existential drama that really made me want to puke my ovaries out. It can do away with the harvesting; mining the moon already creates far more problems than solving any of them. Moon just fails to see the complications and consequences of every bit of detail put into it. It's what I call skiffy. 5 & 6. The film too is riddled with puns on religion and morality. Examples: Sam's daughter is named Eve, the same clone from Adam's ribs. The harvesters are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospels that tell Jesus' similarly asexual birth. Man is elevated into the status of God, what with the power to fiddle with carbon-based entities. But I can't see the point of clones when them scientists are merely being immoral, unthinking, and uncreative. In the real world, such sort of scientists cannot possibly exist. Skiffy Moon assumes that without God, man has no reason to be moral. When God massacred millions of people in the Old Testament, nobody questioned his morality. But when the new god, man, does the same atrocious act (ie., disposing clones as need be), we're supposed to hate him. It could be, all this is but about man's claim to the highest forms of power: access to clean nuclear energy, and the power to create and destroy humans. But with all this power comes a price: to be inhuman. God is not human. Was he therefore inhuman? What are we, then? 7. Oh the irony of it all come the ending. This story isn't about them clones really. It's really about that giant humping robot Gerty. Moon follows the footsteps of Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man, and Space Odyssey: humans and robots have traded places. Humans have become inhumane and robots humane, regardless of the programming. Aye, the robot is the hero again! Which goes to say Moon just isn't original. I'm prolly the only person who hates the film. I hate it just as much as I hate 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Solaris. All four have one special thing in common: the yawn. Still, if there's one thing my heart leapt out for in this movie it's this:
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
I can't write without smoking a cigarette so before writing this first sentence I roved around the house and looked for one. I found a stick of Ray's Red Marlboros squeezed in one vacant slot of my brother's-in-law (brother-in-law's? Fuck that. I forget. Whatever.) library collection of DVDs. It looks like it came from someone's pocket who's ran a marathon race, the cig all scruffy and battered and creased and crooked with brown stains and tobacco shreds bunched up at one end. If the cig would talk it'd say, "For heaven's sake throw me in the trash can already." The lack of cigarettes is just one reason I can't write. Another is my laptop's fucked up so I'm bound to borrow my sister's Mac Book. While another is that I'm taking depressants to clear my liver of alcohol and prevent cirrhosis, which runs in the family. I'm a health junkie, despite all counter evidence. With no cigarettes, no laptop, and low energy, I'm depressed as hell. The last thing I'd like to do is overdose on caffeine and rev up my serotonin levels but that would require another swig on a bottle of brandy to smash me to sleep. Which is counterreactive to my liver therapy. I am a health junkie I am a health junkie I am a health junkie. I drank three cups of green tea today but I wolfed down a greasy Whooper burger and oil-saturated french fries from Burger King. What I really want is to be a vegetarian. No meat, no sugar, no dairy, no animal products and animal derivatives. But when you step out the door with a grumbling tummy, every street is infested with nothing but fast food chains. What I want and what the world offers are two different bananas. The simple truth is that no matter how you want to be a herbivore, everybody else in the world is a carnivore. Your family is a carnivore. Meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. Your friends are carnivores and alcoholics. Every restaurant out there caters the carnivore population. If there's a vegetarian resto in the city, it's either too expensive or the food tastes like recycled toilet paper. There's no other choice. It's either you leapfrog into the horde of stretched mass suicides or be alone, live longer, and die miserably healthy. I want to rid of all this shit and junk from my system but I'd need a support group, like the Philippine Veggie Association or the Everyday Happy Herbivore Club. Or I might just join my fellow cows and horses chewing on raw leaves in the fields. Every day there are animals dying. They are not dying from old age, cancer, heart attacks, brain tumors, or Parkinson's Disease. They are dying under a butcher knife in slaughterhouses. They are dying choking on soda push pins floating in the sea. They are dying because the forests are bald. They are dying drowning at the North and South Pole because the ice have all melted. Even Santa Claus and his legion of furry elves have died drowning in ice water. They are dying because. They are dying because we magicked them to die with our deadly magic wands. For the past few weeks the heat in the country reached its highest recorded temperature you can literally see people deep fried in their own liquefied body fat. Then for the past two days it rained like the sea was taking over the land. Newscasters bellow it's Global Warming in full throttle, rage and violence combined, punishing us toxin-generating motherfuckers. Us parasites of this giant cellular organism called Earth. If we want to cure the planet of this human-derived disease, we should just nuke all fossil fuel dependent vehicles in all spherical corners of the world. We should just wear rollerblades or rollerskates going to work or school. Or we could fire ourselves from catapults using strategic trajectory positions and pull out our parachute strings when landing on our destination. A Filipino invented a car run solely by water but it was suppressed because it threatened the global economy. The thing is, without oil, all countries will go berserk and the earth will glitter with exploding neutron bombs all the way from ex-planet Pluto. What this all boils down to is our decision as a species to choose between economy or ecology. This is life or death, people. Peace or war. Pepsi or Coke. (Oh shit, another Global Warming advocate.)
Cult films added to my favs, garnering six pink stars out of five. (Fuck you I want them pink, bugger off.) If you want to see an excellent film and not just random comatose inducing junk on the screen, go to IMDB's top 250 movies of all time, cover your eyes and point at the screen, then google the title along with the keywords "watch movie online". I am a pirate. Ar. The resolution sucks mothballs but who gives a shit. It's still a good movie.
I'm kidding.
Funny how my brother-in-law says "barred wire" when he means barbed wire. Wahahaha. He keeps on repeating it it kills me every time. The ending is so bizarre it's stuck to my head. Nicholson had to die a pillow death to retain order. Order snaps back after that, everybody back to their own solitary business, but he changed one wacko's life; he inspired him to escape the asylum, the same Indian chief-looking giant who pillow-suffocated him. Friday, 06 February 2009
Film: UPCAT So I've seen it. And the movie is a disappointment.XP (Cram it into one word and my reaction would be: "Err".XP) I'm tamad to write a review so here are some shotgun bulletpoints:
Overall, the movie lacks direction. I should've written it! With me as the director, producer, main cast, makeup artist, and camerawoman. I can do that all by myself and make it to the box office and movie awards and international film fests.XP Gaaaaaaad, this movie is a reject. It should've been entitled Kropek instead. Sunday, 05 October 2008
Film: Gattaca
FUCKING BRILLIANT. I swear to god. It's beyond the level of Equilibrium for the mere fact that it made me cry.XP I'm a wussy. I don't deny that.:p But this movie is no drama--it's science fiction. Biopunk science fiction. The title comes from the initials of the four DNA nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine). Why not Catag? Like that semi-underground canteen at the Faculty Center in UP?XD The film (notice how we call a good cinematic production a film, a bad one a movie?) is a parody of a not-so-distant future society governed and controlled by liberal eugenics. Liberal eugenics is an ideology that allows you to select you and your partner's superior genes to create superhuman babies without any possible defect, like, say, freckles or puberty pimples. The genetically manipulated superbabies are called Valids, whereas naturally fertilized zygotes that turn to normal (or degenerate, in this society) babies are called Invalids. Their genetic makeup determine their social class: Valids qualify for white collar jobs (CEO, manager, business tycoon, porn club president, etc.) while Invalids are restricted to blue collar jobs (janitor, disco club bouncer, whale dung collector, etc). Genetic discrimination, to put. All you're asked to do in a job interview is piss. To get a DNA sample, of course. Yet this one Invalid man sets out to prove everybody wrong. His name is Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke). He has a Valid brother named Antonio Freeman. Why I mention that, is because you have no fucking business knowing.XP Is because he shows up later. Genetic discrimination ensues in the household, the prejudiced parents wooing Anton over Vincent. All their childhood the kids compete in a swimming race at the beach, and the one who...... waitaminnit. I'm not summarizing, am I?XP So to get to the fucking point, Vincent's always the loser, Anton the winner. But no, Vincent isn't deterred by this. Vincent is ambitious, and he wants to be a goddamn astronaut. Son, his father tells him, the only time you're going to see the inside of a space shuttle is if you're cleaning it. Long story short, Vincent impersonates the identity of a Valid, Jerome Morrow (Jude Law. Ang gwapo niya sa The Holiday holy fuck my clit's bouncing!XD). Vincent dyes his hair, wears contact lenses to correct his myopia and replicate Jerome's eyeprint, sticks the impersonated fingerprint on his forefinger, and even surgically extends his legs to reach Jerome's height. Everyday he takes with him Jerome's DNA samples in blood, tissue, and urine, and sands his skin to prevent himself from leaving his dead skin cells in the workplace, which is the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation where he previously worked as a degenerate menial mopper. He vacuums his keyboard with that pocket vacuum cleaner you see on Window Shopping Network, and replaces his DNA traces with Jerome's dead skin cells and bits of hair. You see the effort playing a different identity?? He even switches from being a lefty to a righty. Alrighty.XD (Funny how I can't masturbate with any of my right fingers.XD I keep saying, I am an animal. The only difference is that I am intelligent and I wear clothes. By animal I mean I am a sexual animal. There's no hiding from it.) I like driven characters. They all seem to know what they're doing, and why they do what they do. Drive explains all the significant and insignificant details in their life.:p So that's about the first thirty minutes of the movie.XP Conflict kicks in when there's a murder in Gattaca and Vincent's eyelash provokes a manhunt for an Invalid lurking somewhere. Aaaand before I spoil everything, I just want to tell you that Vincent succeeds in his becoming an astronaut.XD Wahahahaha.XD Aaaand the physician who unexpectedly checks his DNA before the launch to outerspace knew his real identity all along. Suuweeeet.:p
I watched the cinematic version of Isaac Asimov's The Bicentennial Man: an anomalous robot's journey to becoming a human. The movie murdered the book! Grarrrr. Saturday, 04 October 2008
Movie: Eagle Eye WARNING: SPOILER LOOMING AHEAD. Don't tell me I didn't warn you. Ambitious movie that sets your expectations on fire then souses it off with a swimming pool of piss. It's got the same theme with George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Alan Moore's Watchmen, and the monstrously glorified science fiction movie Equilibrium. (And I take "monstrously glorified" an oxymoron. Monstrous because it's atheistic; glorified because it's beyond the kulangot of The Matrix. Well. Whatever.XP) The theme being: Who watches the watchmen? Who the fuck watches The Big Brother? The government? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Literally meaning, Who guards the guardians? Apparently I have some sort of fetish for utopian-slash-dystopian societies.XP When I watched Equilibrium I was cursing "holy shit," "holy fuck," and "putanginang asteeeeeeeeeeeeg" every thirty seconds or so while thrashing at Lizard like a boxing bag. In Eagle Eye I was mouthing expletives every minute at the first few scenes then the unprintables decelerated to the reverse direction of earth's gravitational pull such that when you penetrate the atmospheric strata and float in outerspace you're stuck in inertia. Witty first few scenes. Beyond that everything atrophies. Fell "in like" with Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf of Transformers and Disturbia) specially at the poker scene and at the photocopier shop where he works. In one conniving comment he says to a poker player something like, You have a girlfriend? Yeah. How long you been together? Couple of months. Do you fuck each other? Somewhat. Somewhat? What kinda fucking answer is that? You fuck her? Yes. We're going on a date later, man. I gotta go; I'm losing... I know you. You're the type of guy who brings his girl down a blockbuster and eat some popcorn and burgers and drinks, then you go home sit on the couch, have sex. Right? But blockbusters and popcorn and all that shit isn't what girls really want. Why do you think they dress up like that? Put those makeup on? Look pretty and all that crap? They want you to take them out fancy. A nice restaurant. Expensive meal. Dim lights, soft music. They want you to show them off, that's what they really fucking want. So you put your last money on the table and win this game. ...and poker player tosses his crumpled money on the table and flips his cards. Two kings. He shrieks in victory. Jerry flips his cards with two aces. Poker player loses. Good bye fancy date. But beyond this scene everything else is anticlimactic. The American government and the whole American nation are puppeteered by an omniscient and omnipotent godlike conscious artificial intelligence called The Big Brother who transgressively speaks with a robotic female voice. Reminds me of John Twelve Hawks' novel The Traveler, another kickass gem of forgotten literature. The keyword is consciousness. Which killed The Big Sister's character because it blurred the distinction between her human and robot qualities. And our two protagonists are in the same way tied to strings and manipulated by this artificial intelligence. So beyond the first few scenes, the characters have limited freedom to act on their own, making them stock characters which bored the fucking shit out of me. The movie's lurking with holes Sister C and Bayaw C failed to recognize however I point them (holes) out to them (Sister and Bayaw). They holy-shitted at the movie at a grand spectacular level similar to Transformers'. Denial. The movie's so good they wouldn't acknowledge its glaring defects. Just what the fuck is up with The Big Sister? What's her plan exactly? I gather she wants to exterminate the president and the senate, but whhhyyyyy? I know the President fucked up when he stupidly fired a missile to a horde of suspected terrorists. Just because of that one impolitic decision, The Big Sister plunges into a throe of reclaiming order in the society. Stupid Big Fucking Sister. What's her motivation, her desire to scheming all these things up? I mean, what's at stake for her? What's in it for her? If it's mentioned in the movie, it wasn't me who failed to get that fucking point. According to my own biased judgment, I am an intelligent human being who has the IQ level of a Promil kid. It's the director, producer, scriptwriter, actors, the whole film department behind it who failed to put that message across. Big Sister, she's the most reprehensible character in the movie. Two-dimensional, stereotypical, underdeveloped. The big picture practically crumbles into molecular stupidity. Then again, smashing effects! But all those cosmetics are bullshit given a bullshit script and bullshit characters, not to mention the bullshit plot. Hex, the crystal bomb cut into diamonds, the characters are brought up (more like forced) into the whole plot to plant two crystal bombs in some convention where government leaders are supposed to be decimated. Stupiiiiiiiiiid. Why can't Big Sister just kill those key figures one by one? Besides, she has the power to manipulate all automated machines including planes, trains, cranes, cellphones, traffic lights and the like. Why go through all the motions when you can just pick up a random stranger on the street and force him into planting the bombs? And the whole injectible heartbeat decelerator when the lead characters board the plane, why go through the whole fight scene just to get those gunlike heartbeat retarders? Why do they have to be confined in a claustrophobic metal box in the plane? They're not hiding from anybody in the aircraft. Pressure levels have no bearing with their breathing mechanism. Why does Jerry have to stand on the table and fire a gun to stop the bomb? When the guards plant bullets in his body, I really liked it that he should've died. Deus ex machina. Boring character needs to die because there's no other way to end the movie other than hard sell into making you cry. But you know what's more fucking irritating? Jerry survives. He gets a hero medal for saving the leaders and he falls in love with whatsername, the girl. By this point I just wanted to hurl my half-finished Sprite at the big screen. I hate UP and everything it taught me. I hate criticism. Before I learned to criticize literature, I swallowed everything with bouncing enjoyment. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge isn't power. I am Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor. Gaaaaaaaaaad. Fish & Go's Scallopini is my new fav food!XD Orgasmic at the tongue I tell you! I can trade it off with sex.XD Wahahahaha. Advert plug, holy shit.XD School is nearly over. Wahoooo! I have nine goddamn longass academic papers to write in two weeks. Ogogog.XP Where's my shotgun?? | | |